The Characteristics of the War on Drugs and the Market of Narcotic
II. The history of narcotics and the international order
To begin to understand the linkages between drugs and violence, one must understand the exact characteristics of drugs. The first step toward doing so is examining the historical context of drug use, drug abuse and government policies that seek to control them. Governments have long treated drugs as a security threat, or, even a social evil of foreign origins.133 However, the institutionalisation of open warfare against them is a fairly recent development. The use of naturally-occurring narcotics134 – especially coca, opium and
cannabis – dates back essentially as far as civilisation itself.135 Opium in particular spread widely and relatively rapidly across the world, starting from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean region, originally as a medical aid and then as a recreational narcotic.136 By the nineteenth century, opium byproducts were used to make increasingly effective painkillers. But as Western nations began subsidising opium cultivation for medical needs, they
133
Mena, Fernanda and Hobbs, Dick, “Narcophobia: drugs prohibition and the generation of human rights abuses,” in Trends in Organized Crime, Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2010, p. 61-2.
134
Synthetic drugs – those whose active ingredients are produced via artificial methods from base
compounds rather than from plants – are a relatively recent development and will be addressed separately later on.
135
Buxton, Julia, “The Historical Foundations of the Narcotic Drug Control Regime,” World
Bank Development Research Group, Policy Research Working Paper 4553, March 2008, p. 3.
Cannabis, coca leaf and opium are respectively processed into marijuana, cocaine and heroin, which have supplanted their forebears as the three most common narcotics in the contemporary world.
136
McCoy, Alfred W., The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, (Harper and Row, New York,
discovered that opium addiction was on the rise as well.137 In the latter half of the 19th
century, chemists first synthesised opium into heroin, believing it to be a less-addictive, more- powerful alternative. As it gained popularity, it began to be sold commercially by a variety of major pharmaceutical companies.138 The middle of the 19th century also saw the two Opium
Wars between Great Britain and China. The Chinese government had long been isolationist, and resistant to the opium trade; Britain sought to open up China as a potentially lucrative market for opium, amongst other products. The British won both of these conflicts, and compelled China to open its borders to foreign trade, including opium.139 As interesting as this conflict is as a historical example of drugs as at least part of a casus belli, it is fundamentally different from contemporary drug conflicts. The Opium Wars took place in a world where narcotics were a legitimate form of international trade and trade itself was an accepted cause for war. Today, neither of those conditions is true.
Around the same time as heroin emerged, chemists had isolated cocaine, the active ingredient of the coca leaf. This was not the first human use of coca – recreational use amongst Mesoamericans had been discovered by the conquistadors as long ago as the 16th century, and
had almost certainly been occurring for centuries beforehand.140 But here too, commercial interests took hold, bringing a variety of medical remedies based on cocaine to market by the 1870s, not to mention a new soft drink called Coca-Cola, whose original incarnation as an alcoholic drink sold as French Wine Coca was stymied by prohibitionists.141
137
Ibid, p. 3 138
Ibid, pp.3-4 139
See Holt, Edgar, The Opium Wars in China, (London, Putnam, 1964), and Gelber, Harry G.,
Opium, Soldiers and Evangelicals, (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Holt argues that the opium trade was not an issue in the Opium Wars, and that Britain sought merely to introduce China into the “company of nations.” With the benefit of an additional 40 years of history, Gelber adds that the drawn-out aftereffects of the Opium Wars and the resentment against Western interference played into the hands of Mao during the Chinese civil war, helping his communist forces defeat Chiang Kai-shek.
140
Streatfeild, Dominic, Cocaine, (London, Virgin Books, 2007), p. 23. 141
Between their pharmaceutical and recreational uses, narcotics (primarily opium) were an important, lucrative resource for Western colonial powers by the turn of the 20th century.142 However, the permissiveness that had until then marked the international community's approach to drugs was about to change drastically, and quickly. At the beginning of the 20th
century, global opium production was at an historic high, with global totals exceeding 41,000 metric tons.143 The major colonial powers of the 19th century dominated the opium trade,
including the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, and the Persian and Ottoman empires. Some of these states were also major international traders of coca leaf and its extracts.144 Meanwhile, the major rising power of the era, the United States, differed from the others in two substantial aspects: it had no large commercial interest in the opium or coca trades, and it had a powerful, rising religious/social-justice inspired prohibitionist movement.145 Following the American takeover of the Philippines from Spain in 1898 (along with its hundreds of formerly Spanish-operated opium retail outlets and its tradition of recreational opium use),146 the
United States in 1909 convened the first international drug control convention in Shanghai.147 While this convention did not lead directly to the adoption of binding legislation, it set the stage for the first meaningful international convention on the opium trade: the 1912 International Opium Convention, signed in The Hague.148 The convention compelled signatory nations to restrict opium imports to an amount deemed “medically necessary,”
142
Mena and Hobbs 2010, p. 61; see also Buxton, 2008, p. 6: “Revenues from opium exports...
and domestic sales taxes contributed 11% of the total revenues accruing to the British administration in India.” 143 Buxton, p. 7. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid., p. 8. 146 Ibid., p. 10. 147
Thoumi, Francisco, “The international drug control regime's straight jacket: are there any
policy options?” in Trends in Organized Crime, Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2010, p. 76.
148
though it left the exact amounts undefined. The splintering pre-WWI international order made widespread acceptance difficult; only five nations ratified the treaty.149
The wake of the world wars left an international order dramatically more in favour of an aggressive prohibitionist regime. Nations that were previously major opium producers had either ceased entirely to exist (Austria-Hungary, the Persian and Ottoman empires), or seen their empires and influence winnowed down to a shadow of their 19th century selves (the UK,
Germany, Holland, Spain). Meanwhile, the United States, which maintained a prohibitionist attitude toward drugs despite the failure of alcohol prohibition, emerged from the wars relatively unscathed physically and in a position to dictate terms to weakened allies and defeated enemies across the globe. Additionally, the League of Nations, though hobbled by lack of participation from major nations (notably the US), had created a number of conventions dedicated to suppressing the opium trade in particular, and the narcotics trade in general, thus laying the groundwork for a prohibition-focused international community.150 Its replacement in 1945 by a more widely-representative and empowered successor, the United Nations, meant that there was now a more effective means in place to institute and enforce a global norm regarding the trade in narcotics.
The UN moved quickly to take up the prohibitionist mantle. In 1961, it enacted the most thorough international drug prohibition measure to date: the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This sought to unite all the prohibitionist measures instituted under the previous treaties into a single document, with the ultimate aim of rendering illegal the non-medical cultivation, trade and use of narcotic drugs globally.151 While subsequent drug control conventions have modified its particulars, the 1961 convention remains the underlying basis for international prohibition, a regime without equal in scope or size. Virtually every country in the world is party to the Single Convention, and the UN has subsequently built up a bureaucracy for enforcing drug prohibition, most notably the UN Office on Drugs and Crime 149 Buxton, p. 13. 150 Ibid., p. 16. 151 Ibid., pp. 22-3.
(UNODC), whose remit is to aid national law enforcement and counter-narcotics units in prohibition enforcement.
Few countries dare to challenge the consensus. A few (most famously the Netherlands) have limited their enforcement of laws relating to “soft” drugs such as marijuana, ecstasy and psychotropic mushrooms. A few others have either directly participated in drug trafficking or intentionally turned a blind eye to it, including Panama under Manuel Noriega,152 Bolivia
from 1980-1982,153 Burma from 1991-1996,154 Afghanistan155 from 1996-2000 (and, arguably,
at present) and North Korea156 – but these are by and large outlaw states, separated from the international community primarily by their domestic and foreign policies rather than their approach to narcotics. In short, the ban on the drugs trade has evolved to a point where it is as solid an international consensus as exists in the world today.
This international consensus has three important consequences, which are explained in greater detail below. First, it moves the international narcotics trade out of the legitimate sphere into an unregulated, transnational criminal market. Second, it allows states to utilise as much violence in their counter-narcotics policies as they see fit, which legitimises an unlimited use of force in the name of narcotics control. Third, it creates an economic dynamic that favours the use of violence by traffickers, whether they have political motives or simply a desire to make large quantities of money.
The fact that the entire international drugs trade, from production to consumption, is now completely outside the sphere of legitimate economic activity creates a unique dynamic. Other conflict-linked resources are only illegitimate thanks to their provenance; timber or diamonds
152 Bertram 1996, p. 17. 153 Ibid. 154 Felbab-Brown, 2010, location 2140. 155 Ibid., location 1615. 156
“N Korea 'trafficking drugs,' ” BBC News, 2 March 2004, accessed from
from a conflict zone are not inherently illegal and significant international cooperation is necessary to separate legitimately and illegitimately sourced goods (as with the Kimberley Process for diamonds). In other words, as a conflict driver, those resources are both lootable and launderable, which makes it feasible for states and non-state groups to profit from their trade at a relatively low risk to themselves. Drugs, on the other hand, are not launderable – under the current international system, there is no way to legitimise involvement in drug trafficking. A completely illegal market, with no recourse to courts or legitimate means of dispute resolution and contract enforcement, will accordingly operate along a different set of standards as it seeks its own order.157 Mark Duffield draws a useful distinction here between “transborder trade,” which is any kind of international economic activity, and “parallel” or “informal” economic activity, which is inherently illegal to some degree.158 While some types of illicit trade can be disguised as legitimate transborder trade in the complexity of modern commerce, drug markets by nature constitute parallel activity.
Second, in terms of government policy, the fact that narcotics are universally illegal creates space for states to define their counter-narcotics efforts using any amount of force they see fit. In other words, the international consensus implicitly permits a war mentality in the name of counter-narcotics. States party to the global economy cannot afford to openly flout prohibition, which limits their options to a spectrum from semi-tolerance to a full embrace of total eradication. Under those circumstances, nations such as the United States, which have long defined drugs as a security threat, are free to securitise and/or militarise their responses, confident in the knowledge that doing so will not generally strain their relations with other states, who are bound by the same standard and cannot visibly profit from the trade in narcotics. Delegitimising the entirety of the drugs trade also frees states to associate drugs with other forms of completely unacceptable activity, such as terrorism – as discussed in the last chapter.
157
Reuter, Peter, "Systemic violence in drug markets," Crime, Law and Social Change, 2009, 52,
p. 275
158
Duffield, Mark, “Globalization, Transborder Trade and War Economies,” in Berdal, Mats and
Malone, David M., eds., Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, Boulder, Lynne Reiner, 2000, p. 79.
Third, given the fact that states are free to use broad violence while “defending” their citizens from the “threat” of drugs, traffickers have become incentivised to deploy a certain level of violence in response. Additionally, there is at least some evidence of a correlation between drug markets and violence. There are some exceptions to this rule; marijuana-only markets, are not generally violent,159 though marijuana is less attractive as a smuggled resource, both because it can be grown virtually anywhere, and because it is less profitable per kilo than opium or coca products.160 Svante Cornell's survey of conflicts in which drug production supports an anti-government force demonstrates that while there is no correlation between the existence of drug markets and the inception of conflict, there is a notable correlation between drug cultivation and the temporal extension of existing conflicts.161 In other words, while drugs alone may not cause violence, the volatile combination of their presence and an international black market can extend a conflict that would have otherwise ground to a halt.